Douglas Arvidson is a past winner of the WICE/Paris Transcontinental International Short Story competition. His short fiction has been published in Paris, Prague, and in literary magazines in the United States and he was recently invited to be a staff writer for the Prague Revue, a cutting-edge, online literary journal (http://bit.ly/1mMT6ZC). The novels in his fantasy series, The Eye of the Eye of Stallion, include The Face in Amber,The Mirrors of Castaway Time, and A Drop of Wizard's Blood. His new novel, Brothers of the Fire Star, was selected as a finalist in the ForeWord Reviews 2012 Book of the Year national awards and as a finalist in three categories in the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards: Action Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction. It has become part of the pantheon of Pacific literature and is now included in school literature programs. Brothers of the Fire Star is an adventure story set in the Pacific during World War II and concerns two boys of different races and cultures who escape the island of Guam in a small sailboat when the Japanese army invades. They must then struggle to survive as they master the secrets of the ancient Pacific navigators. Appropriate for young adults as well as adult readers, Brothers of the Fire Star is available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com (http://amzn.to/1j3axVk) and Crossquarter.com. Visit the author's website: douglasarvidson.com

Friday, November 19, 2010

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end. Alexis de Tocqueville

Monsieur de Tocqueville lived from 1805 to 1859 (they tended reach their own end game young in those days--infections, mostly), and wrote a famous book about the American experiment with democracy. He was not, as far as I know, a novelist, however, he did, apparently, understand both the agony of the American revolution end game and the agony of the writer trying to put a close to things on a literary level.

So now, here I am, trying to end my own personal little revolution/novel by inventing a good ending. Many questions arise as the writer smells the denouement approaching while the climax roars in his head. How do I avoid ruining a perfectly good novel that I've labored over with mighty love for two years? Is it possible to scotch a perfectly good idea by screwing up the ending?

You can hear your readers talking it over with their mothers on the phone, or at the bar, or in the hair salon, or on lying on a beach towel, or chatting on FaceBook:

"Yeah, I thought it was great, too, but the ending sucked."

Or:

"I hated the ending. I can't believe he killed her off. What was that all about?"

Or:

"It would have been a fine book, but he blew it with the smarmy Hollywood ending."

Or:

"OMG! I couldn't believe the ending! It blew me away!"

Or:

OMG! Wait until you get to the ending. I cried and cried!"

Cliches of failure due to indecisivness come to mind: You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself. Better them crying than me, I say. If Hollywood ever makes a movie out of this book, I'll let them put in whatever ending they want, but for now, I'm in charge and I say, cry baby, cry.

Still, I struggle. How to put this whole 80,000-word deal to bed and get it just right. In an earlier blog, I quoted Mark Twain lecturing that the difference between using the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. The answer, I know intuitively, is right there in the book, hidden in arc of the plot, intertwined in the dialog. There is only one way to do it. Arrrgh. The pressure.

I've now re-written the ending five times. Sometimes I leave them stretched out there, bullet riddled and dying; sometimes they get up and walk away into the sunset; sometimes they desanguinate into the sand, sometimes all those bullets miss them by a hair. Sometimes I give up and go for a long walk.

But, what the hell and OMG, I've finished writing another novel. The angony of the ending is joyful one and sweating to get it just right is a deeply satisfying anguish.

Sunset over Onancock Creek from the cockpit of our sailboat: Mother Nature never gets criticized for her Hollywood endings.

Two Blogs Going

I now have two blogs. One about anything I feel like writing about (douglasarvidson.blogspot.com) and the other about my new book(brothersofthefirestar.blogspot.com). I invite you to visit both. Why a blog dedicated to a book? I believe in Brothers of the Fire Star. It pretty much covers what I want to say about things; about brotherhood and courage and how bad war is for living and breathing people. It says what I want to say about how stupid it is that race and culture can keep those living and breathing people from liking each other and how necessary courage and tolerance are to our survival. In this book, my heros are two boys who have that special courage that allows them to survive against great odss. It allows them to embrace a powerful brotherhood despite the vast differences in their backgrounds. It is that courage, raw and simple, that brings them to their necessary end game. I developed this blog to describe what informed the writing of this book because I thought it might lend it some credence to my goals. In any event, I hope you enjoy the voyage you will take with Joseph and Napu as they meet their fates.